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So we’ve reached “bargaining”. Good to know.
We will do literally anything to avoid changing our ways huh
Next month:
Europe considers sacrificing babies to Satan
I was reading about how carbon capture from the air is going to be a trillion dollar industry. Just SMH. It’s so much easier to not emit than it is to recapture. But since we’ll never get China and India off of coal, I guess we have to do something.
But since we’ll never get China and India off of coal, I guess we have to do something.
This is a bad and uninformed take.
Per person, emissions in both China and India are still substantially lower than almost all developed countries. India’s per person emissions are less than one-quarter of the global average, and roughly one-tenth of those of the US. Close to a quarter of all carbon emissions come from manufacturing products which are exported and consumed in other countries. Textiles and clothes exported from India and south Asia account for over 4% of global emissions.
Labelling India and China as the chief villains of COP26 is a convenient narrative. The financial aid which rich countries promised yet failed to deliver as part of the Paris Agreement signed in 2015 was supposed to help developing countries dump coal for cleaner sources of energy. And while the world berated India and China for weakening the Glasgow Climate Pact’s coal resolution, few questioned the fossil fuel projects being floated in developed nations, like the UK’s Cambo oilfield and the Line 3 oil pipeline between Canada and the US.And that’s without even going back to look at imperialism and its impacts on those countries, and why they’re now having to play catch up with the west (who not only did our fair share of polluting during our own industrial revolutions, but still continue to do so pretty much freely), mostly to provide for the west.
This, like the overpopulation myth, are nothing more than racist distractions created by the rich and powerful to get us to blame “others” rather than look for who is really at fault - them (Edit to clarify: and by them I mean all obscenely rich and the governments they control, faux communists included).
Whenever someone says “we’ll never get China off coal” I just pretend I read “we’ll never get the west off oil”. Saves me a lot of irritation.
I might try that, since trying to engage with those replies only leads to even greater frustration…
You may be surprised to learn that I totally agree with you. In my extremely brief statement I did not treat the nuances of this issue. I think the developing world has every moral right to pursue the same industrialization path as western nations have. I believe our world economy is driving their coal usage. I believe they are still relatively small as a contributor on a per capita basis.
However I also believe that they have less ability to transition to renewables and I expect them to pursue their right to lift their populations out of poverty. And so: we’re never going to get them off coal. With their huge populations, they will inevitably be top contributors as this process progresses. Therefore, we need to focus on mitigations as well as renewables, since this massive set of emissions appears to be non negotiable, and in fact we’d be hypocrites to try, as you point out. I would consider active mitigations the moral obligation of the developed world, and in fact that’s where air capture efforts are mainly occurring.
This isn’t racism, and playing that card in the face of these simple facts is a great way to get nowhere with the issue.
Developing nations have an easier path to renewables. There is less resistance in building new infrastructure than in modifying existing infrastructure. You don’t have to deal with hundred year old equipment when you start with modern equipment.
We’re never going to “get them” off coal because we keep weaselling out of providing them with the support to do so after centuries of exploiting their people and resources for profits the size of which we can’t even comprehend, not because of the size of their population, and not because they’re top contributors, because as stated, neither of those are even true.
What we need to focus on is the fact that this is a global problem and that shirking and shifting responsibility to others only gains those making the profit more time to make more profit. We all breath the same goddamned air, and pretending like there are “us” and “them” in this mess is ridiculous beyond words.
As for that last part - no one is “playing a card” (seriously??), and while your intent might not be racist, the trope you are using, and its impact, are. You not being aware of this fact (or comfortable with it now that you are) doesn’t change it.
Okay I can tell you’re red hot to defend your narrative. Sorry for making it harder for you.
Lmfao, sure, if that makes you feel better about your shitty take…
The developed world owes its advanced state to the use of resources from the undeveloped world and damage to the shared environment.
The developed world should supply non fossil fuel power sources to the undeveloped world, as an investment in a cleaner future and a reparation payment.
Renewables might be able to handle the lesser load initially for developing areas, while small scale thorium or fusion reactors could be future high power options.
It’s difficult to get China and India off coal because they’re doing most of the world’s manufacturing and some processes are currently impossible without it. But ‘we’ exported manufacturing to Asia and ‘we’ buy the products the coal is used for. ‘We’ don’t get to wriggle out of responsibility by pretending that a couple of low and middle income countries are somehow responsible for ‘our’ excessive consumption.
Yeah, we can 100% blame ‘outsourcing to China’ for that fuckup. Actually, we can kinda blame greedy shareholders.
What fuck up? If we were doing our own manufacturing, we’d be using the coal instead. We just wouldn’t be able to blame other countries for our consumption.
They’re also far more “off coal” already than most of the west, and their renewable generation is growing far faster than the coal.
Asking other countries to get off coal and blaming them for climate change is the most entitled wicked shit Western countries do. Yeah we looted you, fucked you over and tried dismantling your democracy for years. Oh we also polluted the world like it is today because of our greedy ways and sold our soul to fossil fuel companies… but you stay poor and don’t use your resources to develop yourself.
I’ll let your comment stand. I agree with what you said. What I said also happens to be true. I didn’t cast any shade on them.
Yeah both is true and can co-exist
China’s usage of coal is huge, but it’s proportiojn has dropped from 75+% in 1990 to around 55%. It’s slow progress - it may accelerate. The problem is the rest of the world exports so much of its manufacturing requirements to China.
China is actively encouraging that aka temu
Western countries are just as guilty, if not more. We contributed terribly for several hundred years, and still today net carbon use is still increasing in developed countries. It’s just not increasing quite as much as before.
I totally agree. I made a very short and unqualified comment about the developing world’s inevitable contribution to climate change and I’ve been getting hung out to dry all day as an uneducated racist imperialist who doesn’t understand how much the west has contributed. I definitely DO. And there’s no changing the developed world’s past but I think we have the wealth and technology to transition to renewable energy and really lower emissions. I don’t think that developing nations have that ability necessarily and that’s all I meant to say. I think that no matter what the developing world does there is a huge load of carbon coming from developing nations, who have every right to industrialize and lift their people out of poverty. There’s no blame in that. It’s just a fact. So here in the west we might want to think about active capture in addition to reduction because we’ll likely need both. If western nations did all the harm up until now then it seems fair for us to shoulder the burden of active capture. My very brief comment didn’t properly address all these nuances, and I’ve been getting all kinds of hate for blaming climate change on developing countries, which I did not say and do not think. I guess it’s good to see people vigorously setting the record straight.
I saw your earlier comment, I knew what you meant.
Yeah historically the United States has admitted the most carbon of any country to date. Other countries are having their industrial revolutions and we are hypocrites for criticizing them.
Not emitting is not that easy. We are in a transition period at the moment. Electric vehicles are here but we don’t have all the infrastructure needed to support them. Let alone the fact that battery tech is not developing as fast as we need it to.
Right now liquid fuels still have the advantage of greater energy density. If we could move to hydrogen fuels that would be cool, and we could repurpose existing petroleum facilities.
But who knows which way the tech is going to go. The only sure thing is that we are in for a wild ride one way or the other.
Other problems with your post aside, you think it’s good enough to emit less but not worth it to actively invest in getting the excess carbons out? The problems they are solving overlap, but they are not the same set of problems.
The energy required to take carbon out of the atmosphere is at best, double what it took to put it in the atmosphere in the first place. There’s seriously strong economic reasons that this is a bad idea.
And it’s perfectly normal for technology to advance and become more effective and efficient over time.
There are hard limits on recapture efficiency. The only way to make it remove more than it creates is to use energy like geothermal. Even then, the production of a carbon capture facility generates enough emissions that it would take years of constantly running, and you’d only ever reach it if you’re using 100% clean energy to power it.
Grind up basalt slightly more than we normally do. Spread it out.
It’s exothermic.
Rate limited, but more than enough to undo the damage if we stop digging up 95% of fossil fuels.
We’re at the point where we can’t prevent the consequences of climate change. We can only prevent it from getting worse and mitigating the effects. Even if we stopped all CO2 emissions this second, we’d still be suffering for years.
It’s worthwhile for us to look at technologies which can reverse our existing impact to some degree. Finding a way to safely and intelligently remove carbon from the atmosphere may be more expensive, but it has the possibility of fixing our climate much sooner than otherwise, and that’s worth it.
It’s important though that we don’t use it as an excuse to stay the same. The cost of doing this “cleaning” needs to be factored into fossil fuel price so transitioning away from it accelerates. Creating some additional cushion while we continue to do that would be very beneficial.
I’ve already accepted we’re fucked. There’s some really good ideas out there, and we know exactly where the majority of the carbon is coming from (I posted a graph in here, the biggest contributor is industry) but legislation isn’t being put in place to target the biggest emitters. Instead, we’re supposed to buy our way out of it by buying electric cars and building more things ie making more industry, when we should be doing the opposite.
You should check out some of Nick Johnson’s videos. There are so many empty, decaying houses in the US. And yet, more houses are being built. It’s astonishing.
Emitting less is possible NOW. Removing carbon already in the air isn’t even possible yet. ClimateTown showed this in a recent vid. All efforts should be towards what’s possible and effective now rather than towards what’s really expensive, not very effective and may may be possible in the future.
What you said is the equivalence of putting all the eggs in one basket, which is a pretty silly use of the human resources available.
Heres the reference about carbon capture, with all the graphs you need to support this fact, for arguing with people later.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10842-5
Chatterjee, S., & Huang, K. W. (2020). Unrealistic energy and materials requirement for direct air capture in deep mitigation pathways. Nature communications, 11(1), 3287.
The vast majority of pollution is from agriculture. Are you gonna quit eating meat anytime soon?
I call BS
I did, and so should everyone else that claims to want to do something about the climate catastrophe.
Artificially grown meat is quickly becoming more and more viable, it’s not like it will be impossible forever to have a steak.I also stopped eating meat and also for climate first, but I wouldn’t say a person is hypocritical not to either. The problem is not with individual consumers, our impacts are pretty much nonexistent on a problem of this scope. The problem is on our failures of regulators, and of grassroots organizations to enact change. If we want to have impact individually it’s not by eating beans, it’s by [redacted]. Or at least by organizing disruptive protest.
And you just won’t be able to convince enough people to stop eating meat to stop animals from being reared and slaughtered. Humans have been eating meat since before we were homo sapiens. Expecting the masses to adopt a radically different diet is foolish.
You don’t have to, although I commend your efforts.
I can’t wait for that day!
Not quit, but I do reduce.
The entire world runs on fossil fuels.
They power the machines used to gather materials. They power the machines that move those materials around the world to be turned into goods. They power moving those goods around the world to be sold. They power moving them again once they’ve been sold. And if we’re really lucky, they won’t use any more at that point.
The electricity you use. The gas in your car. The gas you use to heat your home or cook. The gas the Amazon van uses to get stuff from the warehouse to your door. The gas used by the semi truck to move stuff from one warehouse to another. The gas used by the cargo vessel to move stuff across the sea. The gas used for the mining equipment for the raw materials to make stuff. The gas used in the machines to turn materials into stuff.
Hell, the gas used to harvest crops and move them around and keep them cool, if need be.
Yes, we can and should be working on ways to divest from fossil fuels at every opportunity, but even if everyone was perfectly on board it wouldn’t happen overnight. It’ll take a few lifetimes at best.
We could have started in the 70s or 80s or 90s and maybe we’d be a significant way into those lifetimes, instead of just thinking about starting now.
For sure. I 100% agree. But I am also 100% against severely economically and entropically unviable ways to reduce carbon in the atmosphere.
As far as I can tell, we can either pay now for decarbonization, or we pay much more in the future for not having decarbonized. I know which one I would rather see.
Inactivist baloney. The first four are under your direct control and can be changed in weeks. The fifth and sixth will change themselves within 5 years as diesel will be uncompetitive. Half of international shipping is just fossil fuels, and half of what remains is short enough range that currently commercialising battery tech is sufficient. Mining equipment is already going solar because flying diesel to remote sites is ludicrously expensive.
Most of the remaining emissions can be eliminated by the global top 10% being ever so slightly less craven and greedy, 99% of red meat is nutritionally unnecessary and accounts for the majority of agricultural emissions and crops.
We can and must get most of the way there in a decade, and the only obstacles for doing so are people like you.
The Simpsons isn’t just an animated sitcom. It’s a documentary about the future:
I knew i saw this idea somewhere. I just couldn’t decide if it was futurama or the Simpson
Their staff is full of masons, lol.
- Reduction of fossil fuels
- Literally block out the sun
we’re fucked
Even if we stopped all use of fossil fuels overnight, there’s a lot of ‘baked in’ warming. This isn’t ‘instead of’ it’s ‘in addition to’ when it comes to halting warming.
Yep, it takes about 30 years to see the effects, what we’re dealing with right now is the 1993 emissions, if we stopped using all fossil fuels right this instant things would continue to get worse well into the 2050s.
Won’t help with ocean acidification. Stop using fossil fuels, leave it in the ground.
Yeah, I saw a link to a study that modeled outcomes within the next fre decades where acidification kills enough marine life and favors the reproduction of other microbes. Something about either low oxygen in the oceans and/or the atmosphere, or maybe a dangerous increase in stmospheric toxins resulting from that.
Maybe I’ll try and find it to verify.
Growing evidence that governments/corporations would sooner give up seeing the goddamn sun than get off even a fraction of fossil fuel usage
to be fair, they’ll probably make it block only infrared light, so the visible luminosity stays the same at first…
Then they will be selling ad space on the sunshield! Remember this tweet.
Given much of the transition to renewable energy is planned to be solar this may be counterproductive. China is rolling out monumental amounts of solar at the moment, we can’t just block the sun since it’s part of the solution.
Unless we block the sun with a big solar panel!
That’s a feature, not a bug. Using geo-engineering will take the pressure off of fossil fuel reduction policies. So why use solar power when you can happily continue burning coal and oil?
Sun Power Beaming
https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/news/2022-09-solar-power-beams-a-step-towards-cleaner-energy
https://www.space.com/space-solar-power-satellite-beams-energy-1st-time
This is the scifi future baby! Everything going up from now on 🚀
They lit an LED with a radio and a rectifier. Nothing futuristic involved at all.
I was mostly joking 😂
Consider me successfully poe’d then. Seen so many people taking it seriously and claiming we need to focus on that instead of land based.
Will they use diamondium or diamondillium?
WERNSTROM!!!
I just watched this episode lol.
Literally what happened in the Matrix.
This is the world that you know: the world as it was at the end of the 20th century. It exists now only as a part of a neural-interactive simulation that we call the Matrix… We have only bits and pieces of information, but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early 21st century, all of mankind was united in celebration.
We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI: a singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power, and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun.
Which was really sooooo dumb. “At the time they were reliant on solar power…” as if we aren’t 🙄
I love those movies but their joke thermodynamics are simply atrocious.
The original plot of the movie was that humans were not an energy source but the computing substrate; that all those brains were networked together as a meat-based platform for the AIs to run on, which is why Neo was able to change reality in the Matrix, because he was able to override the programming for the chunk running on him at any given time, just by thinking it.
But the fucking mouthbreathers they got in for their focus groups didn’t get the concept, so they had to rewrite it, demoting humans to freaking lemon-batteries and making a mockery of the whole thing.
Yes I’m bitter.
I can’t blame the focus group participants in that scenario. Maybe using brains as a computing platform is only confusing to morons (which I doubt), but that doesn’t mean they needed to leap to a flatly nonsensical alternative.
I’ve heard this one commonly suggested as a “that would have been better” but was it actually the original script? Is there a source on this?
Damn that makes so much more sense!
Because clearly stacking people in buckets of gloop is the most efficient energy source available.
Wasn’t that specifically in reference to the machines? So the viewer knows that they weren’t relying on fossil fuels and access to sunlight would be their weakness.
What could ever go wrong
Literally the deranged plot that got Mr Burns shot in the Simpsons
I thought it was because he stole Maggie’s lollypop
Truly the age of social media.
“The Sun is killing us!”
“Just block him, bro.”
Has no one seen The Matrix/Animatrix?!
I saw it on Futurama It’s all fun and games till a tiny asteroid pachinks the side of it and it burns a hole through Kyoto, Anagram lover’s Tokyo.
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This is what I call a “hotfix” .
American arrogance at its best.
The EU is also thinking about the same exact measures:
This is human hubris just like how the Holocene extinction is human hubris, we don’t need to pin things on any single national entity.
I think it’s a combination of hubris and desperation. Hubris because it could still go very wrong and serve us a frozen extinction instead of a boiling one. Desperation because those who acknowledge what’s happening know that something probably needs to be done to not only stop but reverse this but the corporations might be more likely to burn it all down protecting their interests than cooperate.
The “easy” solutions will likely lead to war and might not even help anything at this point. The promising technologies still need to be scaled up (also in a way that makes sure we don’t overshoot the cooling targets or remove so much CO2 that plants die out).
The more I think of it, the more I like this desperate idea. If it does work too well, we can always just send more rockets to move whatever it is out of the way. Which we should have built and ready to go shortly after the blocker is deployed. Preferably sitting in orbit to minimize the chances of it screwing up if desperately needed.
Hmm sunlight is also a carbon reducer since it drives photosynthesis. But desperate times…
All I can think of is the last episode of the show Dinosaurs. This is the wax fruit factory and the bunch beetles all over again, except with us as the stars of our own show.
God damn was that a downer ending for a lighthearted sitcom. That kids watched. I didn’t see the final episode until I was an adult, but I bet a bunch of kids were traumatized when it first aired.
Imagine if, instead of the four of them ending in jail at the end of Seinfeld, they died in a nuclear holocaust. Or if How I Met Your Mother ended with zombies eating the whole gang while we watched them scream. I’m guessing that was the level of trauma for kids watching the finale of Dinosaurs.
It was a total downer. As an adult, I don’t watch that episode anymore. It had some enjoyable content, but I can’t start it because of how bleak it gets. Otherwise, that show is probably among my top 50.
The main aerosols proposed for SRM also cause ozone depletion and acid rain. There is some level of control as to where the bad consequences and up and which regions get more extreme weather.
Anyone want to take a guess as to which countries won’t end up with the consequences?
I mean this is just saying the US is open to researching the possibility. They aren’t even committing to researching it.
“However, the report also clarifies that no decision has been made to “establish a comprehensive research programme focused on solar radiation modification.””
It’s a very prudent decision to study it. We can determine and quantify the risks this way.
taxing the rich properly would (blasphem alert) help redistribute wealth among workers and decrease inflation, and also make the world colder, since we dont have to work as much. but i guess we would be stripped from our daily dose of uv light soon. yea who needs vitamin b3 anyway ?
Re-engineering our space program towards space manufacturing, mineral extraction, and building permanent residences in space sufficient enough to support the people that would be needed to build and maintain space-based infrastructure like a reflector would be an undertaking I’m not sure humanity currently has the drive for.
Science and futurism YouTuber Isaac Arthur is going to love this. Giant aluminum reflectors are a huge part of future space infrastructure and he is happy to point this out quite often.
I believe they’re trying to chemically blocking the sun (using sulfur dioxide) rather than physically blocking it.
It is obvious we’re not gonna fix this by changing our habits, so I’m all for a technological solution. It will have unforeseen consequences and we will deal with those, too. Humankind is nothing but adaptable.
